Read Online Murder Is Served by Frances Lockridge - Free Book Online

with the wind behind her down a street. She realized she was walking east on Forty-second Street, and realized that she must, earlier, have walked blindly west, always against the wind, without knowing where she went or why, and then have turned and walked south, finally, toward the subway and then, when she decided not to go to Dyckman after all, east again. She could not go to Dyckman, because they would be expecting her there, looking for her there. She did not doubt they would be looking for her; that would be part of the plan.
    She came to the Grand Central and had walked into it before she realized that they would be looking for her there, too. They always looked, watched, in railroad stations—in railroad stations, at ferries, at bus terminals, because flight led through such places. She had read about that; she had thought how frightening it would be to be trying to run away and to run to first one hole, and find it blocked, and then to another, and another, and to find them all blocked. She had seen a rat do that once, in a place she was staying when she had an engagement in a summer theater, and the rat had seemed to have many holes and all of them had been blocked by the people who were chasing the rat. The rat had run by her in its flight and it had been squealing and she had covered her face and made a kind of moaning sound, but not because she was afraid of the rat, although she was. She had shared the rat’s fear, had moaned with its fear. She moaned now; there was a kind of whimper in her mind.
    But she thought it would make them recognize her if she turned, halfway down the ramp into Grand Central, and went back to Forty-second Street. So she went on, a slender girl, rather over the average height, with very wide eyes, set wide apart in her head. And she walked as she had trained herself to walk, erect, not letting her body sway, keeping her head up. People looked at her, as they always did, and she did not let herself look away. She walked into the upper level concourse and across it, toward the Lexington Avenue side, moving among the people, showing nothing. But there was still a whimper of fear in her mind.
    That must have been, she thought now, looking at the dimly lighted clock, almost two hours ago. She had left the office before noon, she thought—a minute or two before noon. She had arrived earlier than she planned, earlier than she had been supposed to, and she had stayed only minutes. Two or three, she thought—three or four. Then she had almost run down the corridor and then walked along the street, and somehow an hour had disappeared, because she was sure that it had been around one o’clock when she had come to the newsreel theater in the Grand Central and had gone into it. She had been there since, and she did not have any other plans.
    She had not seen, coherently, anything on the screen. She had realized that people were laughing around her, at a cartoon, but when she looked at the screen the moving light on it meant nothing. Once some people around her had hissed when a man on the screen was speaking, and others had applauded. She realized that that had happened several times, as the continuous sequence on the screen repeated itself. And sometimes she had looked at the screen, trying to make it arrest her attention, but she had never been able to watch, or to listen, for more than a moment.
    But it was not that she was thinking, thinking coherently, planning. She tried that, too. But her mind kept slipping away, slipping away to the rat running from hole to closed-up hole, to the telephone ringing in her apartment and Tony’s voice telling her to come, to blood on the desk and the rat, and the blood, and her hatred, and to what she had written. And to Weldon, who seemed now hopelessly beyond her reach. Now it was almost three o’clock, and she had been in the newsreel theater for something like two hours, and a man on the screen was sitting at a table and speaking